TDWG 2007 Conference

By: Lee Belbin

TDWG held its annual conference in Bratislava September 16-22. Thanks go to Eduard Stloukal and his team for hosting an excellent meeting. We used a new structure this year with a introductory day, linked themes and more reliance on Session Chairs to help solicit presentations and review abstracts. This helped to spread the organizational load on a few members of the Executive Committee. So thanks go to Session Chairs.

The conference summarised much of the work of the TDWG Infrastructure Project over the last two years. This project has supported more than 30 sub-projects ranging from 'executive-level' documentation and videos to advancing TAPIR (TDWG's Access Protocol for Information Retrieval). Over 80 documents have been written during the project. These documents include the new TDWG constitution structure and processes, the master standards specification and scores of recommendations and reports. Most of these documents can be found at http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tip.

The new web infrastructure developed by the project provided excellent support to the conference. We now have a consistent  'look and feel' to all applications and have a single log-in. By the way, the TDWG web sites now have over 650 registered users.

One of the most significant outcomes from the project at the conference was the new standards architecture. There were a number of presentations about the three components of the architecture; ontologies, Life Science Identifiers and Transfer Protocols. The Proceedings of TDWG includes abstracts for all presentations, posters and computer demonstrations.

Probably the most enabling component of the architecture is the deployment of LSIDs. These globally unique identifiers provide a link to information based on ontologies and therefore introduce semantic web components to the community. The project  has gathered and developed LSID support tools, drafted a range of support documents including a standards specification (Applicability Statement) and supported more than 10 subprojects to advance the deployment of LSIDs. At this time, LSIDs have been deployed by IPNI, Index Fungorum, ZooBank, CATE and are underway in the Catalogue of Life.

During the past year, TDWG has signed an MoU with the Open Geospatial Consortium and attracted liaisons or membership from a range of groups and users. These include a group dealing with global invasive species, the IUCN and Conservation Commons, the ILTER and CBOL.

The goal for TDWG for 2008 is to rebuild the membership. TDWG is a central organisation for developing standards for sharing bio-data. Organisations such as GBIF are dependent on TDWG for effective standards for locating and sharing bio-data. There are many important activities across this complex and environmentally dependent domain.

TDWG needs your support.

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